Thank you very much, and it's a pleasure to be here in beautiful Seattle.
I'm going to start tonight, I realize there may be a number of people in the audience
who are familiar with Haiti and know it, but we have a very short presentation which we'll
give just to give anybody who doesn't have that background to fill in some of the gaps.
Haiti as you can see is in the center of the Caribbean.
It was the first large island that Columbus landed on in 1492.
In fact, he crash landed on it because his flagship, the Santa Maria, sank off the Northwest
Coast.
They took the wreckage and they built the Navidad Fort where he left his away team when
he went back to Isabella and Ferdinand for whom he named the island Hispaniola, Little
Spain because he found it so beautiful.
Nobody's ever found the Navidad.
It's been looked for decades, never to be found.
The island became the richest colony in the Western hemisphere, dwarfing the output of
the other colonies and the English colonies of the North American continent.
It was really one of the corners of the triangle trade where essentially slaves were picked
up in Africa, traded in Haiti for sugar and that was taken to France where they would
pick up guns and then they would head back down to Africa, pick up more slaves.
That was the triangle trade which made Haiti really the engine that built the French bourgeoisie.
The country became independent in 1804 and as many of you heard, it had a devastating
earthquake in 2010, January 12th.
Along the bottom of the mouth of Haiti there from Port-au-Prince to Laoganne, the towns
were essentially leveled, some 319,000 people were said to be dead from that by the official
Haitian government to have been killed in that earthquake according to official government
figures.
The statistician recently reviewed the matter and came up with a figure of closer to 40
to 60,000, but nonetheless it was a terrible blow to the country.
Many thousands of buildings fell down including the National Palace, most of the churches,
many public schools, burying people.
The city was, Port-au-Prince, the capital was essentially destroyed.
In many areas like in this slide you see houses were built one on top of another and one of
the problems became that houses would topple onto each other and afterwards rebuilding
is very difficult because there are no roads in there.
It's down these little paths, what they call corridors.
It's very difficult to rebuild in that area.
Many of the people who were displaced by the collapsed housing moved to camps.
It was about 1.5 million shortly after the quake.
It is down now to about 500,000 people living in these tent and tarp camps some two years
later.
These are sprinkled around the metropolitan area and are largely now disintegrating under
two years of sun and rain.
When the sun beats on them they're like little ovens.
You can just imagine them baking in one of those tents.
When it rains as it often does at night, they just leak and are of no use at all in stopping
the rain.
Here's one of the largest camps in Port-au-Prince in the Jean-Marie Vincent camp down in central
Port-au-Prince near the old military airport.
A lot of them as you can see have developed into little towns.
They have lottery offices like that little booth you see off to the right, little stores
and beauty salons, barber shops, etc.
Here are the figures on it.
As you can see as of September there were about 800 camps but those are now being reduced.
There is a campaign by the new government of Michel Martelly, the new president, to
buy people out.
He gives them 20,000 or 21,000 gourds.
That comes to about 500 or 525 dollars to move out.
Sometimes police come in or sometimes just deputized goons and force people out.
Many of them are really being laid siege to.
Their supplies which were being brought in by NGOs have been cut off.
Water toilets have been cut down to 7%, 38% respectively.
As you can see as of September that's down even lower now.
People are having to leave in great numbers from those camps.
Where many of them end up are on these settlements of shelters, I won't call them houses, built
outside of the city.
This is a camp called the most famous one known as Corais-Sesales which is essentially
built in the desert out north of the capital.
That is between two dumping grounds from the coups of the Tintayin and Montcabrit.
Very desolate area.
It's essentially a flood plain.
The white rocks that are at the soil make the area very hot and bright during the day.
When it rains the waters flood through there.
You can see it in the upper right-hand corner there.
That's about where it is.
It requires two or sometimes three fairs to get into Port-au-Prince.
Takes hours.
It's not a place where anybody can find work.
They're trying to take Korean investors and build an assembly factory out there to give
the people work.
We'll talk more about that later.
That's the cheap labor solution that they're proposing for Haiti which is no solution at
all.
Outside of the camps you see these large informal communities developing.
People who had originally come to take advantage of the services provided to the camps by the
NGOs.
Water toilets.
Now, of course, those have been cut off.
These camps are left with nothing but they remain out in the fields and people really
have nowhere to go back.
This picture, by the way, looks exceptionally green.
It was shortly after some rains.
Generally the hills of that area are much browner.
The housing that remains, if you drive around Port-au-Prince you'll see it will have red,
yellow, or green markings on them.
As you can see by this study that was done, the bar study, only half of Haiti's houses
are really safe with the other half being basically ready to, should be demolished or
should be repaired.
Nonetheless, people are moving back into them.
In early 2011, 64% of them had families moving back in and 85% of the yellow-coated which
Kit Miyamoto said was an extremely dangerous situation.
Indeed, it is because hurricanes or earthquakes could cause disaster in that case.
This is a picture of a cholera, a field cholera clinic.
Cholera, Haiti is now the worst cholera epidemic in the world, the country which didn't know
cholera two years ago.
In October 2010, Nepalese troops with the UN mission to stabilize Haiti as the US occupation
forces called, imported cholera into Haiti by allowing their sewage to leak into the
headwaters of the Artibonite River, Haiti's largest river.
From there it spread throughout the country.
Over 7,000 people have now died from that epidemic.
Over 500,000 people have been sickened and with the rainy season coming in April, the
situation will get much worse.
When the rains come, the waterborne disease of cholera spreads and it is still ravaging
the country.
It's interesting to note that cholera funding is about $130 million which is about eight
times less than the $850 million spent each year on the UN military deployment of 10,000
to 13,000 UN troops.
Here's what the aid figures show, that about half of the $5 billion which was pledged in
a March 2010 UN meeting has been disbursed.
That doesn't mean it has reached people, it just means the agencies or governments have
released it and nonetheless only about 10% of that actually gets to the people or to
the government I should say.
The other 90% is often bled off.
Usually most of that recovery aid is in fact going to the State Department, the Pentagon,
contractors or the NGOs themselves.
This is the situation of aid in the country, one which is dysfunctional basically.
Here is a picture of the embryonic Haitian Army.
There are 10 of these informal camps around the country.
These are former Haitian soldiers, former death squad members, former people who want
to be soldiers being trained.
This was one of the planks of President Michel Martelly's campaign.
He is a neo-devaluist, has the soldiers as his base.
He was the cheerleader of the 2004 and 1991 coups against former President Jean-Bertrand
Aristide.
The Army used to be called the Force Armée d'Aït or the Haitian Armed Forces, Armed
Forces of Haiti, the FAD.
It was disbanded by Aristide in 1995 because it carried out, primarily carried out coups
against governments which were not following the dictates of either Washington or the ruling
class in Haiti.
Hence, he dissolved it.
Their role in Haiti is being fulfilled now by UN peacekeepers as I mentioned before,
about 10,000 to 13,000.
They are at about 10,000 now.
They popped them up to 13 shortly after the earthquake.
In fact, they had sent 22,000 US troops.
In addition, they were so worried the people were going to rise up.
The UN troops have been deployed around Haiti.
They've committed several massacres.
The most notable being two, one in July 2005 and the other in December 2006 in which dozens
of people were killed.
Their bodies often disappeared.
Many of the families didn't get the bodies of the young men killed back from those massacres.
The Haitian people want them out.
They want them out of the country, particularly since they've imported cholera into the country.
Because of these massacres and also because there are regular events of sexual abuse.
Earlier this summer, Ansel who is living here is from Seattle helped break a story about
four Uruguayan UN soldiers who sodomized a young Haitian man, 18-year-old man in the
southern town of Port-Salut.
This was all captured on a phone and the video was given to ABC News.
It went like wildfire around Haiti and around the world.
Just last week, two more cases in Gonaïve and Port-au-Prince were identified of soldiers
carrying out sexual abuse.
We don't have the details then.
Back in 2007, they had to ship home close to 200 Sri Lankan troops for abusing young
girls as young as nine years old.
In sharp contrast, we have the mission of the Cubans in Haiti.
The Cubans for the past 13 years have deployed on average about 800 doctors around the country
in the countryside.
You see the different places there.
The little red dots are the smaller ones out in the deep countryside.
This is an effort that has won the enduring thanks of the Haitian people.
They really view the Cuban doctors as gods who have brought free healthcare, tend to them
in the deep countryside, often with very few implements or medicine.
If you would like to keep a track of, keep abreast of events in Haiti and what's happening
there, one of the most effective solidarity networks in fact is the Canadian Haiti Action
Network which runs a website which keeps a lot of the English language and French language
information on it.
They in fact have sponsored my tour through Canada and now in Seattle.
They carry all the WikiLeaks documents which we'll be talking about shortly on their website
and have just a wealth of information that you can find there.
CanadaHaitiAction.ca or you can Google Chan, Canada Haiti Action Network.
If you want some books to read on Haiti, there are a few that have just come out.
There's Tectonic Shifts that was just mentioned.
Also Laurent Dubois is a professor at Duke University in North Carolina.
He's just published the Aftershocks of History which is a fantastic account which really
speaks back to the popular myth that Haiti is a basket case.
It can't help itself and it shows really how it has been a wellspring of innovation and
intellect and great wealth as it was for the French colonial empire.
Paul Farmer's book, Haiti After the Earthquake is also a very moving account.
But one of the most important books if you really want to understand the 2004 coup d'etat
is Damning the Flood by Peter Hallward.
He's a professor of philosophy from Britain but has written one of the great historical
accounts of Haiti.
Presently what we're experiencing in Haiti is a restoration of the Devalier regime which
was overthrown 25 years ago.
Last year, former president for life, Jean-Claude Devalier returned.
He said that he wanted to be of help to the country but the investigating judge, an investigating
judge put him under house arrest and began to review a dossier to see what to do about
close to a billion dollars that he stole from the Haitian treasury, the treasury of the
poorest country in the western hemisphere.
But above all, the thousands, even tens of thousands of people who were illegally imprisoned,
executed, tortured and disappeared during his 15 year reign from 1971 to 1986.
Just two days ago, the judge released the findings of his investigation and announced
his indictment which he said would just be for the money stolen, which would carry a
maximum sentence of five years and the crimes against humanity which have no statute of
limitations on them, he cast aside as unnecessary.
Well, needless to say, this has brought a tremendous backlash from human rights groups,
from Amnesty International to Human Rights Watch to many Haitian human rights groups,
all of them crying foul, calling for appeal.
But really this was possible because the government of Michel Martelly was in place and on several
occasions, most recently at the big capitalist conclave in Davos, Switzerland, Martelly announced
that he was contemplating a pardon of Devalier, not that you can pardon crime against humanity,
of course, not possible, but he said he would and so he created some kind of pressure on
the judge, some sort of notion that there needed to be reconciliation.
The world responded with outrage.
He backtracked the next few days, but nonetheless the damage was already done.
The irony to this is that the judge put a house arrest order on Devalier, but almost
every night, any night during the week you could see him in the best restaurants of Pétionville,
the bourgeoisie's quarter above Port-au-Prince in the cool mountain heights, eating with
a large security detail and many well-wishers.
In contrast, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the former slum parish priest who was elected really
in response to Devalier's reign in 1990, returned to Haiti after seven years of exile and was
received by some 10,000 Haitians who poured out spontaneously.
They were basically demobilized by the government radios which said, oh no, Aristide's not coming
back.
But when he came back within about 10, 20 minutes, tens of thousands had massed outside
the airport and this human wave carried him from the airport to his home in Tabar, about
two miles away.
It was an incredible outpouring and I've seen a lot of outpourings in Haiti and this was
one of them.
But the irony is that Aristide, who came back to this acclaim, has himself actually been
under house arrest.
While Devalier under house arrest circulates freely, Aristide cannot leave his home.
He has not left his home since he returned in March of last year.
So this is the reality of Haiti today.
President Martelly is facing some crises of his own.
He's been accused of very severe charges of corruption.
For instance, to give you a taste of it, the dossier is very large.
We can talk about it more if we'd like.
He has quadrupled the per diem fee that a president gets when he travels abroad and
President Martelly travels abroad a great deal.
The Haitian president used to get $5,000 a day.
Martelly put it at $20,000 a day.
His wife, if she travels with him, gets $10,000 a day.
If his children travel with him, as they often do, they get $7,500 a day.
If some of his colleagues and friends, what he calls counselors, he gives them those titles,
travel with him, they get $4,000 a day.
And Martelly rarely travels without a huge retinue of people, not 15 or 20 as his customary,
but 30.
So these junkets that he's taken have been huge cash machines, giant ATMs on wheels which
travel around the globe to Davos, Ireland, et cetera.
That's where he just came back from.
So we have this on the one hand, but to top it all off, the cherry on top, if you will,
is that it appears he is a US citizen, which is in stark violation of the Haitian constitution,
which says you have to be a Haitian citizen who has never renounced your nationality.
Well, about seven months ago, we found one of his family members who was willing to talk
to us at Haiti Liberté, and they told us that he'd had a passport, that he'd been a US citizen
since 1993 or 1995.
We didn't run with the story because we could never confirm it.
We called the State Department.
I could say we could never explicitly confirm it.
We called the State Department.
We asked them.
We said, is he a citizen?
They hemmed and hawed quite a bit saying, there's privacy laws.
We can't tell you that.
But finally, they gave us an answer.
And textually, word for word, their answer was, to the best of our knowledge, we have
no reason to believe that President Martelly is now or has ever been a US citizen.
Well, we took that as a yes because it's a simple yes or no question.
Look at your computer.
Look at the papers.
Does he have a passport or not?
It's not to the best of your knowledge or you have no reason to believe.
So we took it as a yes, but we still didn't run with it.
But recently, a Haitian senator has begun to delve to the bottom of it using a Haitian
investigative method.
She turned up Martelly's or one of Martelly's former mistresses in the Dominican Republic.
Remember, he was a compas singer in his previous incarnation who had many mistresses around
the globe.
And she was mad.
And she had a canceled passport, a canceled US passport of his, which she provided to
Senator Moise Jean-Charles.
At least this is what he said.
We cannot state definitively that this is the case because we have not seen at Haiti
Liberté the actual passport.
He has given the passport to a Senate commission investigating Martelly's citizenship and that
of 39, 38 other government officials.
And if this proves true, I should say that this commission was headed by Senator Moise
Jean-Charles, who has been a very aggressive and dogged researcher in this matter.
But they carried out a coup in the commission.
So two of Martelly's parliamentary allies are now in charge of the commission.
And they've said that this document, this copy of the passport, of the canceled US passport
cannot be given to the press.
We are nonetheless trying to find the mistress in Dominican Republic and get a copy for ourselves.
So stay tuned to the Haiti Liberté website for that.
But this will cause a tremendous crisis in the government if it's determined that Martelly
is a US citizen because he will be called upon to resign.
However, this could end up being a huge confrontation.
Martelly in a 1997 article with a Miami paper when he was already contemplating his presidency
said the first thing I'll do as president is dissolve the parliament because you can't
get anything done with the parliament.
So it's very likely if the parliament comes and says, President Martelly, you have to
step down, that he will say, no, you have to step down parliament.
So we're waiting to see if this will happen.
It's just speculation at this point.
But the ingredients are starting to come together.
In this week's Haiti Liberté, we look at the review process that is beginning and they're
starting to find that indeed many of the members of the 39 flagged by Senator Moise are indeed
US or foreign nationals or have dual nationality.
So this is the crisis that is brewing.
Haiti Liberté found an easier way to get a clear answer out of the State Department
this past summer and that was through WikiLeaks cables, which were provided to the newspaper
by WikiLeaks.
It was a great honor.
As many of you may know, the 250,000 secret US diplomatic cables that they came into possession
of were originally given to four mainstream media, the New York Times, the Guardian in
England, Der Spiegel in Germany, and Le Monde in France.
But those big media did practically nothing with the documents.
In fact, the New York Times boasted that they received clearance from the State Department
before they published any of their articles on the WikiLeaks documents.
That gives you some idea of the servility and timidity with which they approached them.
So WikiLeaks decided to adopt a new strategy.
They said, we're going to go to the press in the countries concerned by them and give
them the documents.
So we're very proud that they chose Haiti Liberté as the media to release the documents
and to edit them because we had to go through the documents and remove names, block out
the names of people who might have their lives or livelihoods threatened by the revelations
made therein.
It was a very cloak and dagger operation receiving the documents.
Remember, WikiLeaks began as a hacker organization.
They knew a great deal about Internet security and they said, no, we cannot email you the
documents.
We have to deliver them to you in hand and not just deliver them.
When they came, it was a team of three, and they gave us training in how to receive the
documents, how to put them on a computer that wasn't connected to the Internet so we couldn't
be hacked in by Pentagon or State Department hackers, to all sorts of password protocols.
In fact, we were finally put on a secure video link with Julian Assange who explained to
us how to take a small thumb drive they'd given us and put it in with a passkey and
decrypt the documents, which finally we did.
What we got were 1,918 documents which were marked Haiti by the State Department.
This doesn't mean they came from the Haitian embassy.
In fact, it means that any communication throughout the US diplomatic service, it might be from
Ottawa to Washington or the Vatican to Washington or Paris to Haiti, all of these that involved
Haiti would be marked H.A. and we got them.
When we heard that the documents before we'd received them spanned from March 2003 to February
2010, we were overjoyed because finally we knew we'd get a glimpse into the intrigues
that happened at the embassy in the February 29, 2004 overthrow and kidnapping of President
Aristide.
Much to our dismay and disappointment when we got the documents, we found that the period
from 2003 up through March 2005 from the US embassy in Port-au-Prince was not there.
We asked Julian Assange, we said, what happened?
Where are our cables that we're looking for?
He said that most likely they were a higher security level.
The classification for our documents were from a confidential more or less through several
degrees up until secret.
But it's believed that the other documents may have been top secret or ultra top secret.
Of course, these cables are one of the lowest levels of secrecy.
Those documents were finally combed through by our team.
We found a number of stories which were of great interest nonetheless.
What they essentially showed was how the US embassy has over these years been working
as the handmaiden and ringleader of US corporate interests in Haiti.
The one we started off with was the story of Petra Caribe where Venezuela came to Haiti
and said, we'll provide all your energy needs.
14,000 barrels of oil a day, you pay 60% upfront, 40% you pay over 25 years at 1% interest.
Saves the country $100 million a year.
Even the US embassy had to admit in the cables that this was tremendous boon to the country.
But they nonetheless worked with Texaco Chevron, Exxon Mobil to torpedo the Petra Caribe deal.
It took them two years on the very day that President Rene Perval was inaugurated in 2006.
He went straight from the podium where he delivered the inaugural speech to a room in
the palace.
The press was invited and there he signed with Vice President Rangel of Venezuela the
Petra Caribe deal.
It wasn't for two years that that oil could begin flowing and that was due solely to US
embassy sabotage.
They also sabotaged efforts of Haitian parliamentarians to raise the minimum wage to $5 a day.
Assembly workers were being paid $1 in change a day to assemble electronics and clothing
for labels like Haynes, Fruit of the Loom, Gap, Levi Strauss.
This effort by the parliamentarians to raise the minimum wage to $5 a day still would have
been the lowest minimum wage in the Western hemisphere.
They fought it and they won this time.
They won at least temporarily and got President Perval to intervene and put it down to $3
a day.
It's all outlined in the WikiLeaks pieces we did.
The other areas, and you can check them, they're on the Chan website that I showed you, very
well laid out.
We have them also on the Haiti Liberté site, but the Chan website does actually a better
job of laying them out.
We looked at how they tried to block Aristide's return in conjunction with Canada and France,
the Vatican, to keep him from returning.
For seven years he was in exile in South Africa.
We looked at how they helped integrate paramilitaries into the police force, the police force which
was supposed to keep the peace.
They put people who had been coup makers, paramilitary coup makers, into the police force.
We looked at the earthquake aid, how they deployed without any Haitian government clearance,
22,000 troops, and then went and badgered any journalists around the world who criticized
their efforts.
This is the nature of the problems in Haiti today.
Haiti was in many ways a vanguard nation throughout these past two centuries in the Americas.
As all of you probably know, it was the first and last successful slave revolution.
Cuba, next door, their great revolutionary leader was Jose Marti.
His birthday was celebrated just at the end of January.
One of his closest allies in the Caribbean was a Haitian president called Antonor Fermin.
Fermin was a leading intellectual of his day and of his time who inspired legions of pan-Caribbeanists
and anti-imperialists in the following years in fighting the hegemon, the growing hegemon
to the north.
Antonor Fermin became close friends with Jose Marti.
In fact, Marti, he left on his final voyage to Cuba in 1895 from the port of Cape Haitian.
One month later in May, he was killed in battle fighting for a free Cuba.
This has been the role of Haiti throughout history.
It was the first nation to foil US election engineering in 1990 with the election of President
Aristide.
Up until then, the US basically had been able to successfully apply their formula where
they would back a candidate through their National Endowment for Democracy with millions
of dollars.
Just like here, the candidate who spends the most wins, but it didn't work in Haiti.
It foundered, and a priest who was outspent 64 to 1 by the US candidate won the election
in a landslide.
It changed history.
It was then that Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia and Correa in Ecuador
and even Lula in Brazil began to look and say, wow, we can do that.
This is the vast front and just take those elections, make it possible.
Haiti has been this leader and we owe it that respect.
We should always remember the words of Antonor Fermi on his deathbed when he said, a people
can live only so long under tyranny and justice, illiteracy and misery, and then one day they'll
rise up.
Thank you.
You seem to be fairly against Martelly, and I'm curious, who would you have backed in
last year's election?
Well, I think first and foremost, as Aristide said on his arrival, it was an exclusionary
election.
Haitians call it a selection, not an election.
I think that the Provisional Electoral Council of Haiti should have been allowed to decide.
Essentially the first round of the elections were a total mess, totally fraud-filled, violent,
smart mess.
The results of that, in fact, what happened was all the candidates got together in a big
press conference the same day and said, none of us are going to participate in this.
Then the head of the UN mission called Martelly and Myrlaan Marenga and said, you guys are
ahead.
You're going to win.
Don't pull out.
They flipped.
They abandoned everybody else and they said, okay, we'll get on board if you're going
to have us win.
The results that the Electoral Council handed down had Myrlaan Marenga first and Jude Celestin,
the candidate of the Inite Party of former president Rene Preval, come in second with
Martelly close third.
Well, at that point, the OAS and US intervened, meddled in the Haitian election and basically
overruled the Electoral Council, which has by the constitution is the final arbiter of
electoral matters.
They said, no, you're going to put Martelly in number two, which happened, but not with
the Electoral Council's grace.
The Electoral Council had to vote, a majority vote to approve the first round results, which
it never did.
Essentially, that second round election that was held on March 20th, 2011 was illegal.
The first thing I would say would be there should have been inclusionary elections,
inclusive elections, including the Lavalas family.
Second, the Electoral Council should have been able to exercise its sovereign right to conduct
elections as it sees fit, and that would have been the result.
But Martelly essentially was to our mind imposed by the US and OAS.
This government is corrupt from what you've described and other things I've read, but
on the other hand, it is the existing government and how could you see the money handled in
a transparent, accountable, really productive way?
Well, we totally agree with Paul Farmer.
No matter what we think of the Martelly government, we think as a matter of principle, the Haitian
government, whatever the Haitian government is, should be the one conducting and leading
the aid effort, and all efforts in Haiti.
Essentially, since the 1990s, if you read the USAID reports, they've been looking for
ways to circumvent the state, the central government, to weaken it, to destroy it.
We see the security of the country in the hands of foreigners.
We see the aid to the country in the hands of foreigners.
We see the administration of the country in the hands of foreigners.
You have a weakened state, and as a matter of principle, we feel that this has to be
the change.
It has to be the state.
That is the only thing that the Haitian people can vote in, put in, and have a say over.
They can't do that with an NGO, or with a foreign government, or with the IMF, or with
the World Bank.
It's only with their own government.
If the Haitian government is corrupt and doesn't do the right thing with the aid, that's then
for the Haitians to figure out what to do about that government.
To us, the essential problem in Haiti today is that these foreign forces are essentially
taking over the country and denying it its self-determination.
Thanks a lot, Kim.
I really appreciate your time today.
As you know, I was in Haiti during the earthquake with my family.
When the earthquake hit, we started whatever medical relief we could provide at our hotel.
It was incredible to read the WikiLeaks cable that says, the gold rush is on from the U.S.
Embassy.
That's what they're thinking about, how to make money off of the situation while there's
one of the worst tragedies in history.
One thing, while I was in Haiti, I wrote an article from the airport while I was there.
I talked to a guy who's working with an evacuation service.
He was getting evacuating people out to the DR on flights.
He said that he was not able to run one of his flights because Hillary Clinton was coming
in to give a speech.
They grounded everything for three hours in the airport.
That meant they didn't allow aid to come in to Haiti for those three hours.
This is the fifth day after the earthquake when there's still people trapped and who
could be saved if aid is flowing continuously.
He said his flights were not able to get badly injured people evacuated.
Then he said another flight was grounded so that she could get a suit flown in from the
DR for a change of clothes for another media appearance she was making.
We know that everything she was saying was rhetoric and that's how they work.
One thing I read in your documents really struck home because when I wrote that article,
I got an email very soon after from someone threatening a lawsuit that I insinuated things
and spoke poorly of the secretary.
I was worried about it but nothing came of it.
I think it was in your reporting or I don't know if it was somewhere else but I think
it was in your reporting that the U.S. embassy put out a cable saying please keep us informed
of any articles about Haiti that speak negatively of the U.S. aid relief effort and deal with
that problem.
That's exactly right.
That was Ansel's piece on the post earthquake response.
Excellent.
Thank you for revealing that because it made clear where this random threat came from,
trying to silence voices that were pointing out the horrible job the U.S. did in the aid
relief.
When you talked about tens of thousands of people dying in this earthquake, well, thousands
of them died directly in the earthquake but tens of thousands more died because they didn't
get water or food in the first three or five days and they were trapped under.
So I greatly appreciate that reporting and I just want to know what we people in this
room that want to continue to challenge our government because as you said the foreign
intervention is the main problem of this greatly wealthy area of the world that can take care
of its own problems.
What can we do to challenge our government to stay out of their affairs?
As Roger said, there is the Canada Haiti Action Network.
I think you, Jesse, are involved with mobilizations here in the Seattle area and there are people
who are aware of this throughout the country about the U.S.'s heavy hand.
We have to just keep our wits about us.
If you listen to former President Clinton talk, you'll suspect that he's of the same
opinion that we have.
In fact, he is facilitating the program that was essentially the program of Jean-Claude
Duvalier 30 years ago when I made the film Bitter Cane in Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship.
We looked at how the program of the government was essentially had two pillars, sweatshops
and tourism.
That is now the formula once again 30 years later, the same formula, sweatshops and tourism.
Ironically, one of the reports which we published in Haiti Liberté which was produced by Haiti
Grassroots Watch was on the Caracol Assembly Complex they're putting up in the north.
This was built on the region's most fertile land.
It's destroying a virgin mangrove forest, a coral reef.
The UN groups that studied the project and were making recommendations about it said
that area provided $1.3 billion of value to Haiti, however they quantify that.
This is now being paved over to put in a factory where people would be paid five bucks a day.
It's going to produce another Cite Soleil in the area.
It's not the type of development.
It's been shown over and over again that this sweatshop development does not bring development.
Thanks a lot, this has been really very helpful.
I just have a couple of questions.
The La Valas movement, has that fractured?
Is it still together?
Is it still one party?
Are there other parties that are progressive that are doing things in Haiti?
The second one is do the Haitian workers have unions?
If they do, how strong are they?
What kind of role are they playing?
The La Valas movement is beginning to get its, the La Valas party I should say, because there
is a distinction between the La Valas movement, which is the broader democratic movement that
began in 1986, and the La Valas, Femi La Valas party, which was the party formed in 1996
with President Aristide as its leader.
The party itself is reorganizing.
It's now holding congresses in the departments of Haiti.
Those are like states.
There are 10 of them throughout the country in the buildup for a national congress, which
I was told was supposed to be around March 20th.
I don't think it's going to happen on March 20th.
Maybe it will be in May or June or July.
But sometime this year we expect to see a La Valas family party congress, and at that
time they are supposed to announce a new leadership.
Aristide will be stepping back.
He is looking to become some kind of Nelson Mandela-like figure, I believe, from my discussions
with him last April.
That's what I sense.
He is looking to pass the torch, if you will, to a new leadership.
The party has not spoken out a great deal about Martelly, has not responded to many
of his programs.
It's been quite prudent, I would say too prudent in that respect, but they do expect to go
into elections, and if they do, are likely to have the same sort of response, very favorable,
that they've had in the past.
As for unions, I should also say there are other initiatives happening at the base, at
the grassroots levels, to start organizations which will be more engaged.
A lot of that is happening in our office, at the Haiti Liberté office, which is combined
with the Bureau of International Lawyers.
A lot of groups meet there every day, every week, huge meetings discussing strategies.
There's been a lot of talk of starting another party or initiative or front, but nobody wants
to really get in front of the Lavalas family until it's clear which way they're going.
As for unions, frankly, most of the unions in Haiti are either yellow unions or phantom
unions.
There is a union, Bataille-Ouvrière, which has done good work in some of the assembly
factories.
They've had a politically confused stance in some cases.
They supported the coup of 2004, which has earned them a lot of scorn from portions of
the progressive movement worldwide, but they have done some good organizing work.
There are other unions like the CAATH, which has some internal problems.
It basically has two heads, two factions, but it is also a union which functions on some levels.
The union movement, we cannot say is strong, but the will is there.
One of their problems is that it's very hard for Haitians to pay dues.
Five dollars a day, how much are you going to pay in dues from that?
You talked about the devastating effect that cholera is having on the general population.
I think you mentioned that over 7,000 people have died, and there's over 500,000 that have
been infected.
I just would like to know what has happened to those people that have been infected.
One more question is that I saw this documentation where they showed these big warehouses.
They were stuffed with everything from baby pacifiers to big trucks for delivering goods
and stuff.
What has happened to that stuff?
Is it still sitting in the warehouse?
Is it there because people are greedy, incompetent, or they just don't care?
For the first question, of the 500,000, one of the important things to know is that the
Bureau for International Lawyers and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti have launched
a lawsuit on behalf of 5,000 of the victims of cholera.
Those are people who either had cholera or had family members die from cholera.
They collected 5,000 of them, and they launched a lawsuit against the United Nations demanding
reparations for Haiti from the United Nations for bringing cholera to Haiti.
We'll see what happens.
The UN has never officially recognized its responsibility in bringing, importing cholera
into Haiti, and this lawsuit aims to rectify that.
But cholera is a disease of poverty.
Then you have slums which have open sewers running through them, the mud filled with
cholera bacteria when there's a heavy rainstorm.
It's very difficult to control this.
It is an epidemic which is going to be plaguing Haiti for, I think, decades to come.
It is a real human tragedy.
As for the materials that you saw, I'm not sure what has happened, but I think the problem
with aid has been that there are a lot of NGOs which are in a, I could call it a racket.
They make money off of this charity.
I think a lot of aid has been wasted in this way.
It's even dumped.
I've seen it even in Brooklyn, New York, where one of our offices is.
We have an office in Port-au-Prince, but one in Brooklyn as well.
I once saw a warehouse of a church which had done a collection for Haiti filled with things
like you're saying, toys and discarded clothes.
Eventually, they ended up dumping it because they never could get it shipped to Haiti.
People had brought it.
I think there's a huge problem with the aid going to Haiti.
I think when people do give, you should do it judiciously to organizations which have
a track record of effectiveness.